I have been tweeting about a series of workshops I have been running for a group of arts and cultural organisations. This is part of a much bigger collaboration between 11 organisations including the Baltic Mill, the Sage Gateshead, Live Theatre, Northern Stage, the Tyneside Cinema, the Theatre Royal, Way Good, Tyne & Wear Archives and Museums, 7Stories and Dance City. The bigger project is being lead by Clare Cooper of Missions Models Money and is looking at all aspects of collaboration between the partners.

My goals for these workshops has been to get senior people from each organisation to share their questions about digital, map the vast digital landscape from their perspectives and look for light-weight opportunities for collaboration.

I will be writing and presenting a report for the group but I thought in the spirit of keeping the conversations open I would summarise some of my thoughts and findings so far. This may also spark some ideas in other similar organisations and if so I’d love to hear from you so that we can feed these reactions into our on-going conversation. I am not, of course, going to reveal confidential information about any of the partners although I was excited to discover that every one of them is doing some things very well.

Is digital really going to help our organisation?

I can identify a number of common worries that will be familiar to many organisations and not just in the cultural sector:

It is hard to know how to keep up to date

How to select from the bewildering array of opportunities

Digital is hard to buy because want and need are poorly defined

Building a business case for many digital projects is often difficult

It is easy to make mistakes and back the wrong horse, technology or social channel

Scalability is a concern; what if this is a big success, how will we cope?

Separating public and private personalities is very tricky both for organisations and for their staff

Making money is harder than it looks

What do we mean by digital anyway?

Our discussion of what constitutes digital demonstrated clearly the widely differing perspectives from which the landscape can be viewed: digital as the product of a cultural process (a DVD or installation), digital as a means to an end (using online to allow artists to collaborate), digital for marketing and communication (effective uses of the web or social networks), for operational improvement (reducing printing costs) and for audience engagement (user generated content or discussion). In defining opportunities for collaboration it is useful perhaps to separate these dimensions.

It is easy to take a technological perspective and I spent some time with each group discussing mobile, social platforms, ticketing, ecommerce, iPad, tracking, analytics, streaming and changes in behaviour such as crowdsourcing, piracy and paying for content.

What are some of the opportunities for collaboration?

This was the heart of our workshop and together we produced an impressive list of activities and guidelines that appear worth exploring further.

Here are a few of them:

Share the employment of a blogger, journalist or content writer

Agree on standards for publishing and exchanging data such as events

Share workshops on key topics such as SEO, PPC and analytics

Divide up some of the small projects between the partners and let them report back to the whole group. This would reduce the sense of there being too many things to try

Make sure that lessons from both successful and unsuccessful experiments are shared